An occult critique of Jung's conception of the Collective Unconscious

Jung was a truely brilliant observer. He was what we could
call a Phenomenologist. That is, he studied the appearances
or phenomena of the psyche - the various appearances and manifestations
and forms that the psyche produces - and understood them with a depth
of insight that has probably never been equalled since. And
it is his observances in this way that make his writings, heavy and
obscure as they are, a mine of information on the workings of the human
psyche.

But when it came to interpreting his observations metaphysically
- to formulating hypotheses in other words - he was disappointing.
Jung's so-called "Collective Unconscious"
cannot be denied as an empirical or phenomenological fact. But I
would say that for the most part what Jung stumbled upon was not
any sort of "racial memory" or collective human psyche, but the experiences of the Inner Being (sensuSri Aurobindo), including the Numinocosm or psychic universe in all its richness and power.

From the occult perspective then, Jung's Unconscious is not something
which is tied up with the human psyche at all. It should not even
be called the "Collective Unconscious". After all, one does not refer
to the physical world as the "Collective Physical". The term
"collective" is redundant in the latter instance, as it is for anyone who
reads Jung with esoteric eyes.

And so because of this misinterpretation of the "Collective Unconscious"
in biological holistic-materialistic
terms, the significance of this discovery was lost. Which is perhaps
just as well, as - apart from a few occultists (and no-one who is any way
part of the mainstream listened to or understood them) - there was no-one
in Jung's day, and precious few even in our own, who can sympathetically
understand such a concept. So it was the very conser-vatism of his
metaphysics which guaranteed the acceptence, partial and critical as it
was, of Jung's ideas.

The trouble with Jung's term "Collective Unconscious" is its sheer
vagueness and ambiguity. The same term is used to describe realities
that, from the perspective of occult understanding, are quite distinct,
no matter how much they may resemble each other from the point of view
of the superficial materialistic consciousness.

It's like the problem with "God"
and religion. Just as
to the esoterically uninformed, any experience that transcends the personal
ego and takes them out of themselves must be "God", so to the conservatively
alternative or New Paradigm understanding any greater or transpersonal psychic or archetypal reality must be "the collective unconscious". These problems have
arisen because of the metaphysical impoverishment of our present materialistic
society.

It seems that when Jung was describing the "collective unconscious"
he was referring to one of at least four different realities:

any of the worlds of higher, spiritual or divine archetypes, or any of the Gods or Cosmic Powers that inhabit those worlds (as explained in Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, etc etc)

the wider or greater psychic reality beyond the individual ego and personality,
especially the Numinocosm

the earlier or parallel paraphysical realities, such as are described by
Blavatsky and Steiner
under the headings of previous Rounds, Root Races, etc

the lower, atavistic, sub-physical reality, which a number of occultists,
such as Osmund Spare, have attuned to.

What all these realities have in common is simply that they are pre-personal
or trans-personal; they are atterly beyond the consciousness and boundaries
of the individual rational ego-personality, and hence encountering them
elicits a feeling of awe, like the traditional religious "God" (and certainly
realities (1) and (2) at least would automatically be defined as "God"
by any religiously minded person).